Antibiotics

Carl Zimmer via StatNews: BOSTON — Slava Epstein works in aggressively low-tech quarters at Northeastern University. You might expect otherwise, given the extraordinary work that he and his colleagues are doing, discovering new…

This post was originally published on HoneyColony. The 20th century medical revolution messed up in at least one regard. Instead of wiping out disease, it created a new generation of antibiotic resistant bacteria that…

Although it’s been repeatedly said that we’re on the verge of entering a post-antibiotic era, scientists have now discovered a new antibiotic that kills pathogens without detectable resistance. Their research paper is…

Last year the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of the apocalyptic public health implications of antibiotic-resistant organisms. Now the World Health Organization has issued a statement that it could…

Although doctors and scientists have been warning that the so-called “golden age” of antibiotics is rapidly waning, we just don’t listen and now it may be too late. Fergus Walsh, medical correspondent…

Maryn McKenna says that “After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?”, writing at Food & Environment…

Via NPR: There’s disturbing news coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The sexually-transmitted disease Gonorrhea is getting close to being untreatable. There’s only one antibiotic left that works against…

Via ScienceDaily: Large quantities of antibiotic-resistant bacteria enter the environment via municipal — and especially hospital — wastewater streams. Although wastewater treatment plants reduce the total number of bacteria, the most hazardous…

My bet for how civilization will end in 2012…The worst strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” have largely been found within hospitals, but the newest version can be contracted far more easily and is…

The good ol’ days of penicillin …. Michelle Roberts reports for BBC News:

UK doctors are being told the antibiotic normally used to treat gonorrhoea is no longer effective because the sexually transmitted disease is now largely resistant to it. The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found.

For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and instead use two more powerful antibiotics. One is a pill and the other a jab.

The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing resistance. Tests on samples taken from patients and grown in the laboratory showed reduced susceptibility to the usual antibiotic cefixime in nearly 20% of cases in 2010, compared with just 10% of cases in 2009.

Many doctors dispense Quinolones–such as Levaquin, Cipro and Aveloxl–as if they were Pez these days. Cipro, for example, is useful against Anthrax, but some doctors have been known to prescribe it for possible infections that haven’t even shown up in tests.

But fluoroquinolones are now known to researchers to sometimes cause tendinopathy, neuropathy, and other serious adverse effects. They work by preventing bacterial DNA from duplicating, and it seems they might sometimes harm human DNA as well.

So why haven’t the manufacturers told doctors about these risks? And why hasn’t the FDA ordered them to?